如果您要收回家作坊失物招领处的任何物品，或者有关于这些物品所有者的信息，请跟我们联系。Please contact HomeShop if you would like to reclaim any lost & found item or have information regarding the owner of these items.

《革命将至 L’insurrection qui vient》, donated by 蔡凯 CAI Kai

Recent acquisitions inadvertently parallel other discussions we’ve been having lately, or trying to have, a discussion about the discussion. Sometimes things feel a bit removed, like translators talking about translation, and either we get so entrenched in our own discourses that we never reach consensus, or we play multimedia-like because we cannot escape certain distancing from ourselves.

《The Anarchist Cookbook》, donated by 蔡凯 CAI Kai

After a long split, the anarchists find one another again in commiseration for their loneliness.

There is a triangle here, let’s not call it love just yet, between art and language and activism—one moving each through another—but we have yet to place our subjectivities within them, even if we could say that it is our intention to implicate every stage of an aesthetico-political engagement. But here, in a system where all negotiations have been cut, “what kind of association is enough?” To 上访, to self-immolate or to break out in violence are not so much about negotiation as much as flailing demonstration, so it becomes difficult to see the usefulness of an explanation of the systemics at work, and how many people does the activist have to convince anyway before we could find ourselves on even ground?

“I am not sure I know how to how politics,” the artist tells the poet. We lose ourselves in μετά. Translation and translation and translation, activism cannot escape its traps, art indulges. And yet, in commiseration for our loneliness, he mumbles quietly to me today, “我们的本地文化是什么?” Yes, we had lost ourselves over assertions, growing nations, a new space. So I’m wondering if we can go back to simple observations again, the concrete of “the good life”, another consideration of locality. Productivity (…art and language and activism…) is difficult amidst rough re-identification, but we’re thrown again, teenage angst, the revelation of freedom. The results are not external to good will, or the intention in aiming, but as the old saying goes: “Do what you must, come what may.”

木扇 wooden fan, donated by Fotini LAZARIDOU-HATZIGOGA

——Even if you don’t understand my writing, the above pictured objects and less than 10,000 other items are available for lending from the HomeShop library/10,000 Item Treasury. Please drop by to browse the collection.

HomeShop opened its library to the public this summer. Although its collection comprises “not-yet 10,000 items,” the moment had already arrived for questions about the content, triggering a conversation that I joined the other day in HomeShop’s front space, on the issues of inclusion and exclusion.

As the library grows mostly through donations from friends and neighbors, certain patterns gradually emerge: all the books someone couldn’t take with them, some flea market novelties, something that “might come in handy.” To host anything, or hypothetically everything, would mean all the “bad” as well. Bad in the case of a library means the superfluous, the unhelpful, maybe the hateful; from another perspective, one never knows who will value what in a public library, and cutting away the inessential means cutting away part of a potential public. The central ambiguity of any archive lies on these fissures between values. This is also dependent on the reality of passing time, by which bad qualities are outlasted as a generation shifts and becomes other to itself; however, this process is most apparent in archives proper as opposed to libraries (who, in the future, will honestly cherish all of the pulp novels as books, as opposed to documents? Or do they, even at present?). One can then imagine, as did Jorge Luis Borges, a Babylonian library comprising all that was and is, in effect re-constructing the universe in type, a disorienting and endless universe in which we all dwell.

But of course other hard realities emerge to rebut this imaginary, unlimited possibility: space and order. HomeShop’s shelves are small, but not yet full. The intention of our conversation to edit the inventory—resulting, ironically, in only one or two withdrawals—therefore compromised on a discussion of what inclusion and exclusion mean. As an independent project initiated by individuals (namely, Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga and Elaine W. Ho), whose nurturing is guided by particular investments rather than indifference, the HomeShop Library recalls Walter Benjamin’s words: “But one thing should be noted: the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter.”(1) But with its simple principle of acquisition and circulation based on personal relations, the HomeShop collection becomes a living and metabolic portrait of a community, complicating the possessive fondness of Benjamin’s ideal bourgeois collector.

The ordering methodology can be recognized as not as rigid or as rigorous as that of Beijing’s National Library of China, though it shares the Chinese Library Classification system’s categorizations (starting, of course, with Marx & Mao, passing next through religion and philosophy, proceeding to the hard sciences at the bottom/base). But where the State institution speaks the language of publicness with its vast architectural spaces and purportedly unparalleled collection, the State’s very ordering protocols eliminate even the imaginary possibility of housing the universe on its shelves, where this could at least be a fantasy in HomeShop’s case. (A review of the oddities in the not unimpressive foreign languages section at the National Library is enough to wonder what is the basis for their acquisitions; recommendations are not invited, I was told.) The universe, after all, is composed of many, many small and particular things, not just the mapped planets and giant balls of gas. Even without space, attentiveness and affect define an alternative order of ordering. As the Indian archival project Pad.ma points out: “To not wait for the archive is often a practical response to the absence of archives or organized collections in many parts of the world. It also suggests that to wait for the state archive, or to otherwise wait to be archived, may not be a healthy option.”(2)

One pertinent irony of our contemporary media-saturated world is the State’s inability to accommodate the histories that make up the most intimate (ie. unofficial) parts of people’s lives, which actually make up the majority of all stories. But is the ambition of the (art) project to recover all lost histories, to pursue the exhaustion of this chaotic universe on its shelves? And do we hope that the State eventually takes up the pursuit of accounting for this breadth of experience? But isn’t it true that they already do to some extent, through the surveillance of all of our movements and stockpiling of all of our utterances? The gap exposed is therefore not the abyss of quantities, but the ground on which qualities are encouraged to develop. HomeShop’s library, emphasizing the knowledge and feeling that flow from individuals and can be borrowed—social exchanges, that is to say—hosts a potential to reflect the library as a universe despite or rather because of its modesty, its ethics-under-development. That said, at the end of our afternoon crusade of book-purging, we finally had to put off the decision of what to cut, until some other moment in the future.

Michael Eddy

The HomeShop Library is open daily for browsing and for borrowing. Please come by.

“I’m Abu, and on May 9th, 2011, I borrowed from HomeShop a blank white notebook for a duration of two years. In these two years I would like to fill in the contents of the notebook, a part of which will be based upon specific conversations carried out with members of HomeShop.”

Almost exactly half a year after the opening of HomeShop at Jiaodaokou Beiertiao, we venture mildly into another opening of sorts, one which declares itself not to mark the event but as a form of understanding the many amidst a few. Who said quantity does not matter? The HomeShop library has existed quietly since our first days here, without proper titling or forms of organisation to lend it the sense of value that archives tend to garner, and now in our sixth month we can stand back proudly—nerdily—from this diminuitive corner enough to say that an operation exists, or at least an attempted form of organisation that allows itself as an offering. The collection could be about some supposed form of traced ownership (we attempt to label the provenance of each item), and this suggests a different attitude towards collectivity that may go beyond mere expansion towards other forms of gift and exchange.

Who said quantity doesn’t matter? If you donate three items to the library, of a nature including books, tools or other media useful and of interest to a larger public, you will be entitled to join as a library member for lending other items from the collection. Loans can thus be made for flexible periods spanning a few days up to a few years, depending upon the nature of the item and your need. Quantity, or time, matters.

In conjunction with this announcement, the library will be open for your perusal and lending, as it has been already, though perhaps certain aspects of organisation will be made clear where they were less so before. There is a question as to whether this serves to facilitate or deter from participation, as should be asked of all our social forms in general, so thus let this Saturday serve as one experiment among the many.

Activities for your perusal and participation:

browse the collection of not yet 10,000 items, including literature, film, small devices and more

This session of the Happy Friends Reading Group is co-hosted by Michael EDDY (long-distance), 何颖雅 Elaine W. HO and 伊莲 Desireè MARIANINI. The HomeShop library is an initiative of 何颖雅 Elaine W. HO and Fotini LAZARIDOU-HATZIGOGA, managed and supported by 王尘尘 Cici WANG. Thank you to Annie SHAW for bibliothesque inspiration.